How Filly Broke Through Subconscious Blocks To Birth The Body Knows Retreat

How Filly Broke Through Subconscious Blocks to Birth The Body Knows Retreat

Listen to the full episode.

Sometimes the thing you’re called to create isn’t blocked by time, strategy, or money. Sometimes it’s blocked by something quieter — the stories you don’t even realise you’re believing, the fear that sits underneath your logic, and the nervous system “signals” that show up when your heart wants one thing and your mind keeps pulling you back to safety.

In Episode 163, Filly shares the real behind-the-scenes of how The Body Knows Retreat was born. Not as a business project, but as a heart-led creation she’d been dreaming about for months (and talking about for years). She walks through what happened inside her when she kept putting the retreat to the side — the rational objections, the subconscious blocks, and even the emotional and physical signs (including losing her voice) that showed up as her system tried to navigate the stretch.

At Chris and Filly Functional Medicine, this is the work we see again and again: the body is never separate from your decisions. Your nervous system, your beliefs, your grief, your identity, and your health are all in the same conversation. That’s why this episode isn’t only about creating a retreat. It’s about Ending Body Burnout, healing from within, and learning how to move through subconscious blocks in a way that supports whole body health.

Where the Dream of The Body Knows Retreat Started

Filly shares that she’d been dreaming about holding a healing, transformative in-person retreat for the community for around six months — and if she’s being fully transparent, she and Chris had talked about retreats for the last six years.

That’s important, because when a dream keeps returning, it’s usually not random. It’s often a signal. A nudge. A deeper part of you saying, “This matters.”

But the mind tends to respond with very reasonable arguments:

• “It’s too much work.”
• “What if no one comes?”
• “Life is nice and cruisy right now… do we really want to be creating another thing?”
• “It’s too costly.”
• “People say you never make any money with a retreat.”

These thoughts sound logical, but they can also be protective. In mind body medicine, we see this as the nervous system trying to keep you safe from risk: judgement, failure, disappointment, visibility, responsibility, or simply the discomfort of growth.

And the tricky part is that protection often disguises itself as practicality.

When the Mind Rules and the Body Speaks Up

For months, Filly let her mind rule. Yet her heart kept prompting her to create the retreat. And every time she listened — even a little — she broke through another layer of subconscious blocks until she took full-blown action.

This is a powerful pattern in holistic health and burnout functional medicine: when you repeatedly override what you know is true for you, your body often starts sending stronger signals.

Filly shares emotional and physical “signals” that showed up when she kept putting retreat creation to the side — including losing her voice.

That detail matters. Your voice is expression. Truth. Visibility. Being heard. Being seen. And while we never want to oversimplify symptoms, it’s worth noticing how often the body mirrors what’s happening internally.

In integrative medicine and root cause medicine, we’re always asking: what is the body communicating? What is the pattern underneath the symptom? What is the nervous system trying to do for you?

Sometimes symptoms are not just “random”. Sometimes they’re the body’s way of saying, “This misalignment is costing us.”

The A.L.I.G.N. Framework: Moving Through Subconscious Blocks

Filly introduces the A.L.I.G.N. framework she used to overcome subconscious blocks around running a retreat — and it’s also the same framework that will guide the transformational journey at the retreat.

While the episode goes deeper in her own words, the essence is that alignment isn’t a vibe. It’s a process. It’s a way of meeting fear, listening to the body, and choosing action that is heart-led rather than pressure-led.

In health and wellness, people often try to “push through” blocks with motivation. But subconscious blocks don’t dissolve through force. They dissolve through safety, awareness, and truth.

That’s why frameworks like this matter. They give your nervous system a map. They help you move from spinning in your head to being anchored in your body.

The Hidden Fear: “I’m Not the Type of Woman Who Can Hold Space”

One of the most significant subconscious blocks Filly shares is a hidden fear: that she’s not the type of woman who could hold space for a multiple-day transformational retreat.

This is such a common root pattern — not just in business, but in healing.

“I’m not the type of person who can…”
“I’m not built for…”
“I’m not consistent enough…”
“I’m not disciplined enough…”
“I’m not strong enough…”

These identity-level beliefs are powerful because they don’t feel like thoughts. They feel like facts. And when a belief feels like a fact, your nervous system will organise your behaviour around it.

In mind body medicine, this is where so much change happens: when you stop trying to fix behaviour and start addressing the belief underneath the behaviour.

Because if the belief is “I can’t hold that much”, your system will create avoidance, procrastination, distraction, or overwhelm to keep you away from the thing that threatens your identity.

That’s not self-sabotage. That’s self-protection.

The Unexpected Breakthrough: Grief, Sadness, and the Miscarriage Story

Filly shares that one of the biggest breakthroughs came through an unexpected rise of grief and sadness around a miscarriage she’d had in the past, during a transformational breathwork session — and how it birthed her into action to create the retreat.

This is the part that lands in the body.

So many people in a WellnessJourney are trying to heal symptoms while carrying unprocessed grief. Not always conscious grief. Sometimes it’s grief that was never fully felt because life moved on, responsibilities continued, and survival mode didn’t allow space to process.

In holistic wellness, grief isn’t just emotional. It’s physiological. It can affect sleep, digestion, immune function, inflammation, hormones, and energy. It can also shape identity: who you became after the loss, what you decided about yourself, what you learned to suppress to keep functioning.

Breathwork and other somatic practices can open the door for what’s been held in the body to finally move. And when it moves, something else becomes possible: clarity, courage, softness, truth, and aligned action.

This is healing from within. Not as a concept, but as an embodied experience.

Taking Big, Heart-Led, Aligned Action

After moving through layers of subconscious blocks, Filly took big, heart-led, aligned action to make the retreat happen.

This is an important distinction: aligned action doesn’t mean action without fear. It means action that honours fear without obeying it.

In burnout functional medicine, we often see people stuck in two extremes:

• pushing hard, forcing outcomes, overriding the body
• freezing, waiting for certainty, staying “safe” but unfulfilled

Aligned action is the middle path. It’s the path where you listen to your body, regulate your nervous system, and still move forward.

It’s also the kind of action that supports health optimisation because it reduces internal conflict. When your heart and your actions match, your system can settle. When your system settles, healing naturally becomes more accessible.

Why This Matters for Ending Body Burnout (Even If You’re Not Creating a Retreat)

You don’t need to be launching a retreat for this episode to be relevant.

Most people have a “retreat” of their own — a dream, a decision, a boundary, a next step in their healing, a conversation they’ve been avoiding, a truth they’ve been minimising, a part of themselves they’ve been postponing.

And the same subconscious blocks show up:

• fear of being seen
• fear of failing
• fear of disappointing others
• fear of change
• fear of not being “the type of person” who can do it

At Chris and Filly Functional Medicine, we see how these patterns can keep symptoms switched on. Not because the symptoms are imaginary, but because the nervous system stays in protection mode. That’s why a whole body health approach matters — physical support through functional nutrition and testing, and deeper support through nervous system and subconscious rewiring.

If you want to explore that deeper work in a structured way, you can learn more about the Ending Body Burnout Method.

A Gentle Next Step If You’re Feeling the Nudge Too

If you’re feeling a nudge — in your health, your life, your relationships, or your next step — and you want support connecting the dots between your symptoms and your deeper patterns, you’re warmly invited to book a Discovery Call or connect the dots with us. It’s a calm, no-pressure way to explore what might help you move forward.

And if you want to check out the details for The Body Knows Retreat, you can head here: https://www.chrisandfilly.fm/retreat

Listen to the full episode.

Chris & Filipa Bellette are the Founders of multi award-winning health practice Chris & Filly Functional Medicine, which is best known for ending body burnout (for good!) in “busy” people with energy, mood and gut issues. They have worked with over 3,000+ burned-out clients in the past combined 30+ years, with their own passion for ending body burnout coming from their own personal experience of body, mind, family & business breakdown, after a prolonged period of physical and mental stress.

Filipa is an accredited Clinical Nutritionist, Functional Medicine Practitioner, Coach & Trauma Therapist. She is also a Ph.D. Scholar, author & regularly featured the media, such as Forbes, Body+Soul and The Daily Telegraph. Chris is a Burnout Recovery Coach & an accredited Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) Master Practitioner, with a Bachelor of Human Movement Science. He has existed in high-performance realms of the sporting (think national athlete) & business industries and knows what it takes to get out of hustle-and-grind culture to thriving. 

They were recently awarded as the Tasmanian State Winner & National Finalist for the Telstra Best of Business Awards, and Winner of the Australian Women’s Small Business Champion Awards.